Nice paper!. However, if I may, I wasn't convinced by your response to objection five. The objection, I take it, is that the intuitions you are marshaling about incoherence derive from a non-moral standpoint, that is, they are intuitions that arise when one is doing metaethics and not when one is actually moralizing. And it seems undeniable that Moore paradoxical sentences are straightforwardly bizarre when uttered by persons in the context of actual moralizing (just imagine actually having the relevant conversation). At the outset of your paper, you correctly note that expressivism is a theory about actual moralizing, so it seems like this is one objection to which you should be very sensitive. You respond:

This is not really a rejection of C3, but a rejection of C1, since it admits that it is not always the case that affective or conative attitudes are expressed by moral assertions. If non-cognitive mental states are only sometimes expressed by moral assertions, then the clai ... (read more)

Your work is technically very interesting neverthless I have some remarks.

1/ I don't always understand the claim that the Fitch Paradox threatens Anti-Realist philosophy.If everybody accepts the Knowability Principle restricted to basic propositions,it sounds more like a victory than a defeat for the knowability advocates.It seems that what is threatened is more the capacity of modal logic to represent the knowability.

2/ In your intuitionistic frame, as you say in proposition 5.8, it is impossible to have 'A' and 'not K A' in the same world.So the Fitch Paradox is avoided but the result is a very poor epistemic logic where you cannot express that some truths are unknown.

3/ more technically in the figure below the proposition 5.7I don't understand what happens in the world y.You have y Rk y ; y Rk z ; y: p ; z: not pbut you have not 'y: not K p' .Does it stand that 'y: not not K p' ?It is very counterintuitive.

Else I wrote a dissertation on these points.I have published a - maybe insufi ... (read more)

When we say that "P" is possible iff there is a possible world where "P" is true, we can continue and say that there is a possible world where "P" is true iff "A" is true, and "A" is not something about a non-actual possible world. Such an approach would allow us to use the vocabulary of possible worlds, while sustaining an agnostic or an anti-realist position about the the existence of non-actual possible worlds. Can such a reductive approach to possible worlds solve the problem of
ontological commitmentt to the existence of non-actual possible worlds? And what do you think that "A" must be as non-actual possible worlds dont get implicated?

This week we discussed some unpublished material by Antony on ‘might’ counterfactuals. The handout is here, and the paper is here.

We thought a bit about cases in which ‘could’ and ‘might’ come apart. In the paper, Antony discussed sentences like

33b) If we’d left the gate open, the dog could have got out; yet if
we’d left the gate open, it isn’t the case that the dog might have got
out.

The felicity of such sentences seems to show that at least some
‘might’ counterfactuals shouldn’t be analysed in terms of ‘could’, but
instead should be given an epistemic reading. Antony isn’t averse to
this idea – in fact, his final view is that ‘might’ is ambiguous in
counterfactual contexts between the epistemic reading and the ability
reading. However, this does invite the further question of what
determines the appropriate reading for some given ‘might’
counterfactual.

Fron 33b we naturally conclude though the dog has the ability to get out, it is ... (read more)

I found this a particularly interesting paper. I’m in firm agreement
with the main gist of Williams’ view- that the notion of typicality is
in principle better adapted to deal with chancy similarity than the
notion of ‘non-remarkableness’. That said, we found plenty of potential
pressure points.

- Firstly, I’m not sure that quantum mechanics really has as wide-reaching consequences as is assumed in the paper. Depending on your response to the measurement problem, it could be that outcomes such as plates flying off sideways are not genuine quantum possibilities after all, because the low-amplitude branches are in some way ‘lost in the noise’. Although I think this issue is worth further investigation, I don’t think it’s critical to the debate between Williams, Hawthorne, and Lewis. Their worries can be raised about considerably less unlikely events – in fact, we can restrict ... (read more)

You can find the handout for this week here.
I thought this was a really good paper, and we didn’t find all that
much to criticise in it. It was a bit frustrating not to hear more
about Fitelson’s positive story, in particular about the bridge
principle that he would endorse instead of the various versions of RTE
that he criticises. He’s clearly saving the juicy stuff for his book.

In particular, I find it hard to see how he plans to steer a middle
ground between the Carnap/Williamson-style ‘a priori priors’ version of
objective bayesianism, and the subjective bayesian approach. My naive
take on the matter is that you either think that there’s a unique
correct set of priors or you don’t. Maybe these priors aren’t a priori
knowable (contra the Carnap/Williamson approach), although it
seems that a position like this would be committed to complete
epistemic rationality being in principle unattainable.

This week we discussed Cian Dorr’s ‘There are no abstract objects’, which isn’t currently available online, but is in ‘Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics’. Here’s the handout instead.

As we had Cian on the spot for this meeting, the discussion mostly took a question-and-answer format. So here are what I recorded of some questions and some answers, with a few that I didn’t get time to ask thrown in at the end. Apologies if my paraphrases of Cian's answers misrepresent him!

Q: What about people who would resist the paraphrase strategy (p.37) because they think that counterpossibles are all vacuously true (Williamson takes this line in The Philosophy of Philosophy).A: Nominalism/anti-nominalism are both contingent theses. But even if you think that nominalism is necessary if true, there will be certain kinds of truths like ‘there are possibly some things with a number-like structure’ which can be used to ground the relevant counterfactua ... (read more)

A really interesting paper this week - it can be found here, and the presentation is here.

Kment's main proposal is that match of matters of particular fact
should be relevant to closeness of two worlds for the purposes of
evaluating counterfactuals if and only if the matters of fact have the
same explanation in both worlds. Secondarily, he proposes that we
should allow for laws to have exceptions, and hence that all worlds
which share the same laws as ours should be closer to actuality than
any world with different laws.

We quite liked the main proposal, but worried about the individuation of explanations it relies upon. What are the conditions for two events to have the same explanation? For example, consider the counterfactual 'if I had tossed the coin five minutes earlier, it would still have come up heads'. This seems false, but perhaps Kment can account for this falsity by sayi ... (read more)

“Several philosophers—including C. S. Peirce,
William James, Hilary Putnam, and Crispin Wright—have proposed various versions
of the notion that truth is an epistemic ideal. More specifically, they have
held that a proposition is true if and only if it can be fixedly [sic] warranted
by human inquirers, given certain
ideal epistemic conditions [emphasis added]. This paper offers a general
critique of that idea, modeling conceptions of ideality and fixed warrant
within the semantics that Kripke developed for intuitionistic logic. It is
shown that each of the two plausible notions of fixed warrant faces
difficulties and that, moreover, “truth” defined in terms of either of them is
distressingly dependent on one’s conception of idealized inquiry and perhaps
also upon one’s standards of warrant.”